


almost all of us self-destruct

by angel_deux



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Annihilation AU, Canon Compliant, Clarke works through her self-loathing, Echo's just along to help, F/M, Minor Body Horror, Octavia works through her anger, Post Season 5, Sort Of, They're not together anymore but this isn't Becho-negative, except it's set in the 100 verse and inspired by annihilation, minor/past Becho, so it's terrible, sort of like a hellish road trip fic between friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-01 15:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15776454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: They've been on the new planet for a few months when Bellamy leaves on a scouting expedition with a group of colonists. He's the only one who makes it back, and he's dying. After he goes into cryo to save his life, the three women who love him best decide to retrace his steps, risking everything to find a way to fix him.





	1. silence creates its own violence

**Author's Note:**

> This is very much inspired by Annihilation (both the movie and the book), and follows some similar beats. Mostly it's a story about Clarke's isolation and self-loathing and learning to forgive herself. 
> 
> There are a lot of warring fandom opinions about what went down in Season 5, and this leans heavily on criticism of Clarke. so if you're not into that, this might not be the place for you. It's set from her POV, so I tried to write it as I think SHE might see it down the line. If that's not how you see it, that's cool! But I wrote this to work through my own feelings on season 5, so here we are! 
> 
> Also, this is a very Echo friendly piece. She and Bellamy aren't together anymore, but she's not a villain, and her friendship with Bellamy and friendship with Clarke are central to the story. 
> 
> Basically just please play nice. i know this might not be everyone's jam, so I figure I'll just warn y'all so you know what you're getting into before you read it.

Clarke meant to do it alone, as she has done so many other things.

She packs quietly, lightly, and she doesn’t say goodbye to anyone. She leaves her quarters on the ship, and she heads for the ramp. The door is open to the night, and it lets in the smell of smoke from the fires around camp.

It’s a clear night, and it’s quiet. It’s the perfect night to leave.

The first months on this new planet have been so different from their first months on Earth, but sometimes Clarke has flashbacks to the dropship. Sometimes she can pretend that the hundred are out there. The hundred and Bellamy and Raven, just as it was at the start, before everything became so needlessly complicated.

She can’t pretend tonight, because she knows exactly why she’s leaving.

In hindsight, she’s unsurprised to see Echo standing casually at the bottom of the ramp.

Clarke stutters to a stop, her hands self-consciously gripping the straps of her pack.

She’s halfway down the ramp, her footing off-balanced, her surprise probably obvious. Echo is unmoved.

“You’re going to find out what happened to him,” Echo says. She says it like she says everything: it’s not a question, not even a request for affirmation. She knows exactly what Clarke’s doing.

Clarke doesn’t bother to lie.

“Yes,” she says.

“If you go alone, you’ll get infected too.”

Clarke eyes Echo with a challenge that never reaches her lips.

_And who would care if I was?_

Madi does not need her anymore. She’s Commander, now. And there’s a wariness to her interactions with Clarke that wasn’t there before. The trust between them has been shattered, the way it was shattered between Clarke and her own mother, once. Both relationships are going to take time to repair, but it’s time that Clarke doesn’t feel like she has. Abby has Kane and Jackson. Madi has Gaia and the rest of her people. Neither of them need her the way that she needs them.

Raven and Murphy and Emori and Echo are still reluctant to trust her, their conversations grinding to a halt every time Clarke enters a room. They change the subject to something that can include her. It’s friendly enough, and she knows that they have technically forgiven her, but they talk around their important discussions when she’s near. Not cruel, not angry, but _wary_ , because a person who would throw everyone into the fire to keep their child warm isn’t a person who can be trusted to watch their backs, and she isn’t a person who can be trusted to make difficult choices if shit goes wrong. If she’s going to lose all ability to reason at the first sign of danger to Madi, then they’re going to keep her at arm’s length and make sure that she isn’t in a position to make that kind of choice again.

It leaves an ashen taste in her mouth, because she understands their hesitation. She weighed one life against _all of theirs_ , and they could have all died for it. _Bellamy_ could have died for it. He is their leader and their friend, and Clarke would hate any one of them if they had been the ones to leave him behind, so she understands. That they all survived is not enough to do away with the reality of the choices she made. They have forgiven her slowly, they have accepted her back into the group, but there’s a distance there. They used to know that they could rely on her, and now they know that they can’t.

She thinks that if she left and stayed gone, they might privately, secretly, feel relief. They already worry about the shifting loyalties of people like Diyoza, like Octavia, like Abby. Their lives would be easier if they didn’t have to worry about _her_ , too.  

People she used to call friends, people like Niylah and Octavia and Miller, they’re as different from the versions of them that she remembers as she is from the girl who stayed behind when Bellamy left Earth, and the most she can get is an occasional smile or a quiet invitation to join them at the fire for meals. Bridges being rebuilt, walls carefully coming down, but peace is new to them in the same way it’s new to her, and each side is too wary of the others to make real progress.

Only Bellamy would truly miss her if she didn’t come back.

And Bellamy’s already gone.

Back in cryo, his organs failing. Sleeping while he waits for someone to figure out a way to save his life.

 

* * *

 

 

_She will never forget the way he appeared out of the darkness, staggering through the camp gate, holding up his hands to keep her at a distance. His palms and fingers were dark with blood old and new, and his face was covered in it. His tan shirt was stained, blood wet and tacky over a wound in his side, and it dripped from his mouth when he tried to speak._

_“Infected,” was all he managed to say before the word turned to a whimper and he was coughing up blood and falling to his knees, choking on it, his eyes terrified and locked on hers, warning her not to come closer. He said, “you have to burn it.”_

_Clarke had ignored the part of her mind that wanted her to remember the different ways she could catch whatever it was that was tearing his insides up. When he fell, she reached for him, and she kept him standing, and she dragged him to Medical, screaming for her mother._

_After forty-eight hours of quarantine, she was cleared._

_Bellamy didn’t wake up._

 

* * *

 

 

“I need to do this,” she says. Echo’s expression is blank.

“Then I’ll go with you,” she replies.

“They need you.”

“And you think they don’t need _you_?”

Clarke has spent years learning to hide herself away, to keep her face blank and her emotions hidden deep. She hates how Echo can see past any defenses she puts up.

“They don’t need me,” she says. “Not like I need them. Not like they need him.”

“And like _you_ need him,” Echo points out.

“It doesn’t matter what I need.”

“When will you forgive yourself?” Echo asks quietly. Clarke hides her surprise by pressing her lips together and looking away. “He forgave you months ago. You are the only one still punishing you for what happened on Earth. And you punish _him_ by avoiding him.”

Echo’s expression is open. Not quite friendly, but friendlier than Clarke deserves, and maybe that’s why she doesn’t mind answering.

“I don’t know if I ever will,” she admits.

His eyes on her, watching her leave. She _left_ him there. She _hit_ him. Hurt him. _Him_.

She remembers how sick she felt when she heard what Octavia did to him after Lincoln’s death. The idea of anyone knowing Bellamy, _loving_ Bellamy, and still being able to hurt him on purpose.

She didn’t beat him, but she still caused him pain, and it makes her nauseas now that she has had time to think and realize what her love for Madi made her do. It’s the same brand of nausea that she feels when she remembers the collar around Madi’s neck.

There had been something broken in her love for Madi. It feels like it’s healing, approaching normality, but she’s still so afraid of it.

What she did to Bellamy is not the same as what Octavia did to him, but sometimes it feels the same, and she will always wonder if it felt the same for _him_ , too. To be hated by her, even if only for a little while. To be hurt and abandoned. Did it make him feel like he didn’t matter to her? Did he feel like he _deserved_ it?

She loves him, and yet she almost let him die. Her actions should have killed him, except for luck. And she did not cry for him. She did not feel guilt for her decision until it was almost too late. She cannot forgive herself for that. She cannot let go of that just because Bellamy can.

The more she heals from the isolation of the past six years, the more she hates herself for the things she did when she was no longer alone. That the others have forgiven her doesn’t seem to matter when she can’t forgive herself.

She still doesn’t understand why Monty and Harper marked her as someone to lead the way she used to, and on her loneliest days, she hates them for it.

“I owe him,” she says at last. “Forgiving myself doesn’t matter.”

In a way, maybe this is supposed to be her chance to disappear.

_Save Bellamy or don’t come back._ It feels fitting.

“ _I_ don’t matter,” she says aloud, because she cannot say the rest of it.

“You matter to him,” Echo says smoothly. Clarke shakes her head.

“Not like I used to.”

Echo only smiles, like that’s funny, and she hoists her own pack over her shoulder.

“He’s still my family. That means I will keep him safe by keeping _you_ safe. Raven and Murphy and Emori will handle well enough on their own, with us gone.”

“Echo…”

A sound from the top of the ramp, and Octavia steps out into the firelight. She’s wearing a pack, too.

She smiles, the expression on her face jagged and a little vacant, like it has been since they arrived at this new planet.

“You’re not going without me,” she says.

 

* * *

 

 

_Before he left, Bellamy asked Clarke to go with him._

_“It won’t be long,” he said. “Madi will be okay with Gaia and Echo watching her. But the colonists are worried about the glowing to the west, and they want a group of us with them. It will be good for relations with them, especially if...”_

_Clarke shook her head to stop his explanation, because the time away from Madi wasn’t the problem._

_“You can handle it on your own,” she told him._

_“That’s not why I’m asking,” he said. He said it like it was pointed, like it was supposed to mean something._

_She had done a little exploring on her own, slipping out past the boundaries of the camp that had been set up around the ship, enjoying the isolation and the chance to experience an alien planet. But she had stuck closer to the borders ever since she returned one afternoon to find Bellamy panicked and half-convinced that she had run away from him again._

_It had reminded her that some scars never fade, that some wounds never fully heal._

_“I’ll stay here,” she said. “I won’t leave again.”_

_Bellamy sighed, frustrated, rubbing a hand over his face._

_“I just want you with me,” he finally said. His voice was strained, embarrassed. “That’s all. It’s not because I think I need to keep an eye on you.”_

_Clarke stared at him, uncertain. She smiled, just a little._

_“You want me with you?” she asked._

_“Almost always,” he answered helplessly. She couldn’t contain the smile at all this time._

_“Next time, then,” she said. “I really should stay and help my mother. But…next time.”_

_He squeezed her shoulder._

_“Next time,” he said. “I’ll hold you to that.”_

 

* * *

 

 

With only three of them, they’re able to skirt the camp’s defenses easily. Octavia leads them to the gate that Miller has been assigned to, and he lets them through with only a slightly nervous look for Octavia and a warning to watch her back.

“Are you sure you don’t want me with you?” he asks, and Octavia shakes her head. She’s gentler than she used to be when she speaks to him.

She’s healing, the same way all of them are. Slowly. Incompletely.

“This is something we have to do on our own,” she says.

 

* * *

 

 

_Second Sunrise was the largest settlement on this side of the planet, where the environment was more hostile and difficult to live off. The larger cities to the east hadn’t taken to the new invaders from Earth, and Second Sunrise had been welcoming. Nearly eager. Their strange religious practices aside, the city had been established for generations, and they viewed the Earth refugees as something to be protected._

_Clarke wouldn’t have trusted Bellamy with anyone else. She was relieved when they sent a doctor to camp to help Abby and Jackson examine him._

_“They should never have gone looking,” the colony doctor said. She was an older woman with gray hair and a weathered face. Someone who had seen a lot of death. “I told them all that there was nothing good out there. Our people can be superstitious about the west, because that is where our ancestors first landed. They think it is a sacred site. I think there’s a reason our ancestors left.”_

_“The area has been glowing,” Jackson said. He flushed when the others looked at him, because he was defensive of the members of Wonkru who went with Bellamy and didn’t make it back. “That’s why they went. They wanted to make sure it was nothing to worry about.”_

_“Apparently it is,” Abby said. She was looking down at the readout on the tablet with her brows furrowed. Clarke couldn’t look away from Bellamy under the sterile plastic hood above his bed. Hooked up to machines. A breathing tube shoved down his throat. Barely alive. She was reminded hysterically of a film she watched as a child: Snow White. The princess lying still as death in a glass coffin. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”_

_The doctor shook her head._

_“It’s a fungal lifeform. We’ve seen infections_ like _this before, in people who have explored the caves to the south, but nothing this strong. It’s colonizing him. No one who has ever journeyed west has ever returned. This must be why.”_

_Clarke held back her anger, but she could feel it building._

_Why hadn’t anyone told him how dangerous it would be? Or did he know? Did he know and decide to go anyway? Had he been afraid out there alone? How far had he traveled by himself, infected, injured. Stumbling through the trees. Desperate to get back home._

And you weren’t there to help him.

_“What if we sent another party?” she asked. She hated the way the others all turned to look at her, unimpressed. “This time just to scout. To find out what happened to him. If we can figure out what infected him, maybe we can get a sample and…”_

_“No,” Abby said._

_“It’s too dangerous,” the doctor agreed._

_Clarke stared down at Bellamy’s unnaturally pale face, and she said nothing._

_It was too dangerous, but if no one did anything, Bellamy would die._

_That was too dangerous, too._

_His organs were failing. He would have to go into cryo soon just to keep the infection from killing him, and he would stay there in limbo until someone figured out how to cure him. And that wouldn’t happen if no one was brave enough to risk it._

_She couldn’t lose him. Not again._

_So she would go._

 

* * *

 

 

“Why did you even come?”

Clarke’s shoulders hitch up, and she glances back to Octavia on the trail behind her, expecting to see the younger Blake’s ferocious glare fixed on her.

But Octavia isn’t looking at her; her eyes are locked on Echo, who looks unconcerned and even _bored_ by the question.

“I’m here because I love him,” she says. One eyebrow ticks up. “Isn’t that why we’re all here?”

“I heard he dumped you,” Octavia says, and Echo laughs.

“I always thought you were too much a child to be an effective leader,” she says. “I see I wasn’t wrong. You think because we are no longer one, it means I stop loving him? And that he stops loving me? That isn’t how it works.” She gives Octavia a thoughtful look. “Not for adults, anyway.”

Clarke bites her lip to keep from laughing, though she’s not sure it would be a real laugh at all. They’re all here for their own reasons, all on a possible suicide mission for the man the three of them love, and they can’t play nice with each other for more than two hours without sniping at the soft places that hurt.

_Maybe Jasper was right. Maybe we_ are _the problem_. _Maybe it’s human nature to tear each other down even when you should be on the same side._

“He abandoned you because he’s in love with another woman,” Octavia says steadily. If she’s at all bothered by the accusations of childishness, she doesn’t show it. Her voice is steadier than Clarke has ever heard it.

“We spoke about all the things that have changed, and we both agreed that it was foolish to fight them,” Echo says. Neither of them look at Clarke, as if Clarke isn’t the woman they’re referring to at all.

_Bellamy doesn’t love me_ , she would say, if she could make herself speak.

_Bellamy can’t love me._

_I hurt him._

_I don’t deserve to be loved by him._

“Because he’s in love with another woman,” Octavia repeats.

“Because we found each other in a cage,” Echo says. She glances at Clarke, who refuses to look at her, her eyes scouting ahead. “And we aren’t in a cage anymore.”

Octavia doesn’t have anything to say in answer to that.

Clarke wants to reach out and take Echo’s hand. She wants to say something soft and apologetic, or maybe grateful. She wants to say _anything._

It’s only because of Octavia that she doesn’t.

 

* * *

 

 

_It was Madi who told Clarke that Bellamy and Echo were no longer together. It was stilted, awkward, because they had argued only that morning, and Madi wasn’t going to apologize, but she also felt guilty for yelling._

_The information felt like an olive branch._

_“Bellamy told me that he and Echo are no longer together,” she said, standing in the door to Clarke’s quarters. Right down the hall from Madi’s, but the separation was clear. Commander Madi did not need her mother close, especially not if her mother wasn’t going to let her lead. Madi was happy to take advice, and she was happy to talk things over with Clarke and Bellamy and Echo and Octavia and even Diyoza, but she had the minds of the Commanders in her, and until The Flame was removed, she meant to live up to them. It didn’t matter that the Commander held no real sway over camp. It didn’t matter that it was only one faction of Wonkru that believed in her power at all. It didn’t matter that she was twelve years old. She was going to do hold on to whatever power she could, because she knew that she was helping to keep the Believers centered._

_Clarke could feel some sympathy for it when she remembered being sixteen and wanting her father to tell everyone that the oxygen systems were failing, no matter the risk to herself. She was a child, but she would have done anything to do what she thought was right. Of course Madi wanted to help._

_“Did you hear me?” Madi asked when Clarke kept folding clothes and didn’t respond. Clarke shrugged, putting the pile neatly in her drawer._

_“I did,” she said._

_“Do you know why?”_

_“I haven’t really talked to Bellamy.”_

_“Even though he keeps trying?”_

_“Madi…”_

_“You already said you were sorry, didn’t you?”_

_“It’s not that simple sometimes. You know that.”_

_“But you did.”_

_“Yes.”_

_She’d said sorry at least a dozen times over the first few weeks of being on this planet, until he snapped at her to stop. Now she said it by helping him when he needed it, anticipating his needs, walking with him in the evenings even if they never got around to saying the things that needed saying._

_“Why don’t you talk, then?”_

_“There’s not much to talk about.”_

_“There’s everything to talk about! Especially now. It was the only thing holding you back.”_

_Clarke snorted a little, because that was a child’s way of looking at things, and it wasn’t true._

_“There’s a lot holding me back, Madi.”_

_“He knows that you love him.”_

_“Madi…”_

_“I told him that you called him every day. And he looks at you different now. I think he’s nervous to talk to you. I think he thinks you’re still angry, because you’ve been avoiding him. But you’re not, right? You just didn’t want to be near him because you loved him too much, and he was in love with someone else.”_

_“_ Madi _.”_

_Madi sighed, but she respected the tension in Clarke’s tone._

_“I just thought you should know,” Madi said. “Because everyone can see that he’s in love with you too.”_

 

* * *

 

 

They find the boat half pulled up onto the shore. There’s blood in the bottom, dried and dark, and smears of it on the oars. Clarke touches it, her mind conjuring up the painful image of Bellamy rowing himself, bleeding and sick. Fighting to get back to them.

Octavia crouches down beside the boat, and Clarke watches the war on her face.

Of all of them, only Echo has uncomplicated feelings. Only Echo is uncompromised by guilt. The pain she caused Bellamy was years ago, now, and she and Bellamy worked through it on the ring before ever falling in love. Clarke and Octavia had both dealt their own pain to him in the past, but their most recent betrayals are the ones that turn their stomachs cold now, knowing that if things had been different, maybe they would have been with him. Maybe they could have shouldered some of his burden.

“Where should we go now?” Echo asks. She stalks along the shore, eyes darting, looking for any clues.

“We wait for it to get dark,” Octavia says. She curls her fingers into fists when she stands, some of Bellamy’s blood still flaked on the tips. “And then we follow the glow.”

 

* * *

 

 

_There was a quiet understanding, just before he left._

_She was standing by the gates, looking out into the dark. The glowing mist in the distance was always brightest at this time of night, and she found herself as fascinated by it as the rest of them were._

_It took on a darker tint, that night. It was the last night before Bellamy would leave, and she ached to go with him._

_After six years apart, she wanted nothing more than to be with him, always. To follow him wherever he went. To help him make the difficult choices._

_But she still didn’t feel like she had earned it, and so she would stay behind._

_“Hey,” he said, coming up beside her. He stood closer than he normally would, and she knew that he was as reluctant to leave her as she was for him to leave. She leaned closer, pressing up against his side, and she was relieved when he put his arm around her._

_“It’s dangerous,” she said._

_“I know,” he replied. “That’s why I talked them into waiting this long. But we need to know what’s out there. If it’s something that’s going to keep coming closer, we need to prepare.”_

_He sounded so tired, and she leaned closer, wishing she could give him every spare bit of energy she had._

_Ever since he came back into her life, he had been tired. Trying his best, doing everything he could to help, but_ tired _.  She tried to remember the last time she saw him look anything but burdened by the world, and she realized that she couldn’t._

_She had never known Bellamy when he was allowed to relax. She had never known Bellamy when he was_ happy. _She wondered what he had been like on the ring, in those six years she missed. Had he felt complete? Had he been at peace? Had that all been ripped away?_

_“I’m sorry,” she said without thinking. He sighed and looked out at the glow._

_“I thought I asked you to stop that,” he said._

_“Not just about that. I wish things were easier for you.”_

_He looked at her in surprise, and she turned to face him, pulling away from his arm. She leaned back against the wall of the camp, feeling the reassuring weight of the logs behind her, holding her up._

_“What do you mean?” he asked, and he stepped forward, getting even closer. It was almost_ too much _to be near him like this, knowing that there was nothing in the way of getting closer. Nothing simple, anyway, like Echo or the war._

_“This probably isn’t what you imagined when you left the ring,” she said. He leaned against the wall beside her, and when she sat on the ground against it, he sat too, so their shoulders touched._

I need you.

_She wondered if he remembered that moment after Dax as vividly as she did._

_“I imagined a lot of things when I was on the ring,” he admitted slowly. “I thought Octavia would be…different. I thought I would have to tell your mother I’d killed you.” At her sharp look, he amended, “left you behind.”_

_“You didn’t have a choice.”_

_This had been said, repeated, too many times for it to have meaning anymore, but she always said it._

_“I didn’t think your mother would see it that way. I certainly didn’t at first. And I think she always expected me to be your downfall anyway.”_

_She leaned her head against his shoulder, and she felt his hand on her knee, his thumb brushing over the material of her pants._

_“I thought it would be peaceful, when you came back. I thought we would all be happy.” Her voice was whispered, a confession, and he pressed his lips to her hair and then left them there, and she felt her whole heart swell up with love for him, so she kept going. “I had the village all laid out for you. Places for all of you to live. Rooms that I thought you would like. I drew…I drew pictures for all of you. For me, too, and for Madi, so she would know what you all looked like. I thought…”_

_She trailed off, remembering that she had never bothered to make a room for Bellamy._

_The remembrance of that assumption made her feel that same punch of sadness that she had felt when she first saw him with Echo. Even though it had been weeks since Madi told her that they split up._

_“I thought you were dead,” he said, when it was clear she wasn’t going to continue. “I don’t think a single day went by when I didn’t remember that you were dead. It wasn’t like it usually is. There are whole days when I don’t think about my mother. About the other people I’ve lost. There was something different about losing you. I tried so hard to keep you alive inside me. I tried so hard not to fail you. It was like you were still there. But at the same time, it was like you never had been. Like you were something I made up.”_

_Clarke remembered talking to him every day on the radio. Imagining how he would respond if he could. It had created a version of Bellamy that was not real. Less prickly and grumpy, maybe. Idealized._

_“I know the feeling,” she said, and he nestled closer to her, his body warm against hers._

_She wanted to kiss him._

_“I missed you,” he said._

_All things considered, it was probably a simple thing to say, but it didn’t_ feel _simple. Maybe it was the tone of his voice. Months since they had been reunited, since they had begun to build a new home on this new planet, but she had never felt the impact of their separation as keenly as she did in that moment._ I missed you. _A simple concept, except for the way his voice sounded when he said it._

_“I missed you too,” she said. “Please come home.”_

_His breath hitched, and he buried his face against her hair again, and she reached her arm around his waist and held on tight._

_“When I’m home,” he said. “We need to…we need to have a conversation.”_

_She knew exactly what that conversation would be. She sucked in a sharp breath against his shoulder, breathing him in._

_“I’ll be ready,” she said, and it was a promise to herself as much as it was a promise to him._

 

* * *

 

 

Across the lake, there’s another ship, like the one on which they came to this planet. A mining ship, centuries old.

It has become a part of the landscape, with moss and flowers growing in the cracks in its hull. The ramp is down, and vines snake along it.

“I’ve never seen a worse omen,” Echo says, and Octavia laughs in agreement.

It surprises all three of them, and they look at each other warily, realizing that rowing the boat across the water has drawn them closer together.

It had been an important step: they could have chosen to turn around, could have given up, could have realized that the odds of picking up Bellamy’s trail were slim. But they hadn’t. It was a deliberate choice.

They’re doing this. The three of them, the three women who love Bellamy the most, loving him in the only way they know how: risking their lives to save his.

“Is that the original ship?” Clarke asks.

“It must have been,” Octavia says. She draws her sword as they move closer, keeping Clarke behind her with one hand out to the side. Clarke’s pistol is held loosely in her hand. Echo has her bow.

“Is this where the glowing was coming from?” Echo asks.

They had rowed through the night, watching the glowing yellow fog in the distance, but the sun was up by the time they found the ship. There’s no way to tell except to wait, but Bellamy has waited long enough.

“I’m going in,” Clarke says. Echo mutters something disparaging in Trig that Clarke doesn’t quite catch.

“She’s right,” Octavia says. “We should go together.”

Clarke almost opens her mouth to argue, but she understands when she looks between them. She’s been in her own head, defensive, thinking _I’m not going back without finding something that will help him_ , not realizing that her two traveling companions feel the exact same way.

None of them will leave until they know he can be saved.

 

* * *

 

 

_“I’m so sorry,” she whispered to his cryo pod when they first put him under._

_“I should have told you,” she said when she stopped by to see him two days later._

_“You should have at least known that I…” Her voice choked, stuttered, stopped on the words even though there was no one else here to hear them. “That I love you.”_

_“I love you,” she said again, a week later, and it was easier to say it. There was a speck of blood on the corner of his mouth. She must have missed it when she was cleaning his face before they put him under. It taunted her, and she couldn’t stop remembering him gasping for breath, blood spraying with every desperate cough as his head lolled to her shoulder and he tried to tell her something._

_“I love you,” she said once she had made the decision to retrace his steps. “And I’m going to save you, or I’m not coming back.”_


	2. when you see beauty in desolation, it changes something inside you

The air inside the ancient ship is humid and cold, and Clarke makes them wear the masks she packed to filter it. The doctor from Second Sunrise didn’t think that the infection was airborne, but Clarke doesn’t want to take any chances.

Octavia hates her mask because it obstructs her view, but she agrees. Echo eyes it distrustfully, but she slips it over her face. They move inside, Clarke leading the way with her flashlight, and it feels like stepping into a tomb.

There are bodies on the floor of the cargo bay. Clarke isn’t sure if Echo and Octavia realize that they’re bodies, because they don’t really look like people anymore. Just sad shapes covered in flowers and strange plants. Fertile mounds that have allowed an ecosystem to flourish in the sterile metal interior of this ship, centuries old. Clarke wonders if they belong to the original miners, or if they’re more recent.

She lets Octavia take the lead, and she bends down to examine one of the shapes. She takes samples of the flowers and the small, colorful mushrooms that grow on its surface. She takes samples of what remains of the flesh beneath. When she stands, she sees that Echo has been watching her. Clarke tucks the sample bags into her pack before she joins her, and Echo takes her by the elbow when she’s close.

“I don’t like this,” she whispers to avoid being heard by their third companion. Echo still doesn’t quite trust Octavia. She might not trust Clarke completely, either, but she apparently trusts her more. “This place feels wrong.”

“It does,” Clarke agrees. She squeezes Echo’s arm in turn, and she hopes it’s as comforting as she means for it to be. “We’ll take a look, but we won’t stay long. We might not even be in the right place.”

Echo hesitates, her eyes searching Clarke for answers Clarke can’t give. Then she nods, and they go after Octavia together.

 

* * *

 

 

Later, in the heart of the ship, Octavia makes a fire, and Echo stands guard. Clarke holds the map in her hands, fingers trembling as she follows Bellamy’s cramped, messy script.

Finding the gear of the expedition had left her with a dizzy, disconnected sort of feeling. Like they’d wandered into a graveyard. Bellamy’s pack, his clothes and the small samples he had gathered, made her feel sick with guilt all over again.

_I should have been with him. I should have been here. Maybe I could have helped_.

There are samples of plants, his writing on the bags descriptive and unhurried, and she can imagine him plucking them from the roots and tucking them into his pack, hoping to be helpful. He just always wanted to _help_ , always wanted to make things better, and Clarke can’t remember when she became surer of that than anything else, because she remembers back at the start when she thought the opposite was true.

She wonders if he thought of her when he picked them. On Earth, in the beginning, she had constantly been looking for plants with medicinal properties. Monty had helped her, pointing out things that she could use. She remembers Bellamy listening, glowering, still returning from hunting expeditions with pockets full of useful shit, pretending it was incidental. Even then, even back when she thought he was a total asshole, she knew that he was only pretending not to care.

“Anything?” Echo asks, and Clarke shakes her head. The map that Bellamy drew is marked with place names, obviously given by Bellamy, because they are the names of their friends – dead and alive. He probably only drew it to give him something to do, because there’s nothing really useful marked on it, except for the vague shape of the land. She recognizes the places that they passed on the way here, and she smiles down at the names he has chosen.

She leans over to show Octavia the two peninsulas that jut out to barely touch each other across one narrow area of the lake. _Lincoln’s Point_ meets _Indra’s Point_ , and the area of the water that is cradled between them is labeled _Octavia Cove_. Octavia smiles, and she runs her fingers over the three names.

“Big brother,” she says fondly, watery, before she pulls her fingers back again.

There’s _Monty’s Farm_ , an area of grassy flatland that they passed through to get to the lake. There’s _Harper Pond_ , a quiet little body of water that had beautiful fish swimming in it. There’s a hill for Monroe, and one for Raven, and one for Emori, and one for Finn. There’s a lake for Murphy, and there’s another pond for Jasper. There’s a small island on the lake that he has named for Charlotte. A canyon he has named for Madi. Echo gets a cave that they passed, one with bioluminescent organisms that coated the ceiling and made it look like the night sky filled with stars. She had been nearly giddy, or as giddy as Clarke had ever seen her, her eyes wide as she stared at them.

There’s a field for Clarke. _Clarke Field_. She remembers when they passed through it. There were flowers everywhere, poking out of the grass. The colors were wild, different from anything she had ever seen on Earth. The grass was lavender-colored. Everything about it was peaceful and soft and beautiful.

She swallows hard around the grief.

 

* * *

 

 

_That first week after Jordan woke them up, Clarke steered clear of Bellamy._

_Everything was too raw. He had forgiven her and invited her to the bridge like it was nothing. He had pulled her to his side when they looked down at their new world. He had done it so unthinkingly, as if it was exactly where she was supposed to be._

_It was exactly where she_ wanted _to be, but she couldn’t. Not after what she had done. So she kept away from him entirely._

_He found her one day in the infirmary, where she was checking up on Jackson and Miller. They were among the latest to be woken up, and Jackson had experienced some lightheadedness in the first few hours that she and Abby had both worried about. Miller had worried more than either of them, and he dragged Jackson to the infirmary a few times for checkups._

_“There you are,” Bellamy said when he saw her. It wasn’t quite an accusation that she had been avoiding him, but it was close enough to a question, at least, wondering_ why _. She gave Jackson and Miller a nod to dismiss them. They went, Miller grumbling about Jackson needing to tell him when he got dizzy._

_“Just helping my mother with some patients,” she said. It came out too defensive, and she knew he could hear it._

_“Clarke,_ please _,” he said._

_Exhausted. It reminded her of the way he had looked at her when he left her in chains and told her that Madi would be given The Flame. Tired. Sorry. Regretful._

_Not regretful enough to stop. It had been regret that it had to happen at all._

_Her own regrets were sharp and bitter, and she made herself nod._

_“Okay,” she said. “What is it?”_

_His hands were shoved into his pockets. He had been doing that a lot since he’d been back. She couldn’t remember if it was something he did a lot of before, and it made her wonder if he had gotten tired of clenching his fists where people could see, controlling his rage and his grief with a visible effort the way he used to. She had seen him fidgeting with his fingers a lot more, too. Anxious, uncertain, weighing the future of humanity with every decision. He used to have more outward confidence in his own decisions._

_Then again, he never used to have to make those decisions alone._

_“I just thought we should talk. We haven’t really had time.”_

_“I know,” she admitted. She didn’t have to say that they would have plenty of time if she wasn’t avoiding him. “I’m sorry.”_

_“That’s not what I meant. I don’t just…I’m not looking for an apology.”_

_“Then what?”_

_“Six years was long enough,” he said, an explanation. “I don’t want it to be like this anymore.”_

_He looked at her with something broken in his eyes, and it was the same thing she saw when he said_ I am not leaving my friends _. The same thing she saw when he said_ I can’t do that again.

_She didn’t know what to say to that, but she nodded, and he smiled down at her._

_Maybe one day she would be able to talk to him without hurting, without wanting, without wishing that things had been different when he came back, without regretting that she never told him when she had the chance._

 

* * *

 

 

They find Elan.

His body, what’s left of it, is plastered on the wall of the recreational area. There’s blood pooled at his feet, in some kind of strange drum that has symbols painted on it in blood.

“Second Sunset,” Echo drawls, like Elan’s body on the wall isn’t the most fucked up thing she’s ever seen. “I knew their beliefs were unconventional, but…”

Clarke steps closer, looking at the fungal infection that has sprouted from what remains of Elan’s face. It looks like he’s been here for years, even though she remembers seeing him leave with Bellamy’s group. He was one of the younger men from the Second Sunset colony, a boy who had been so excited to meet them, who listened to Murphy’s mostly bullshit stories about Earth with a rapture that had reminded her of Madi when she was young. And now he’s half-absorbed into the wall, like the infection has leached him into the metal. His legs are gone, leaving only delicate sprouts of some spore-producing plant that trace up the wall in shapes that are vaguely leg-like.

“What is it, Clarke?” Echo asks, and Clarke shakes her head.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she says. She makes sure her mask is tight against her face, and she bends closer.

“You shouldn’t get too close,” Octavia warns, and Clarke can hear the panic in her voice.

“I need samples,” Clarke says.

“You think this is what’s wrong with Bellamy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Octavia subsides, but she still looks ready to either run or fight. Echo is more casual, but Clarke can see the tension in her posture. Her eyes dart around, her flashlight beam following. They’re deep in the ship. It may be the middle of the night. It may be the middle of the day. There’s no way to know.

They can still go deeper, but they don’t know what’s waiting for them.

It’s wearing on all three of them. Not knowing.

Clarke takes her samples, and she marks them with the pen that Bellamy left behind with his map. She writes _Elan_ on each of the bags. She writes the body parts the samples grew on. She tucks them into her pack. She’s reverent, confused, dismayed.

_Is_ this what happened to Bellamy? Are these spores growing inside him? Is the infection eating away at him?

One of Elan’s arms is gone completely, eaten by the fungus that turned his flesh to white, spindly fibers that twist and blow in the wind created by her breath, weak and filtered through the mask. The other arm is missing in places, flesh melting into metal and into fungus, but three of his fingers are still whole and curved outward. As she leans in, one of them twitches.

Clarke flinches back as Octavia yelps. Echo grabs Clarke by both arms and hauls her back, and she doesn’t let go, after. She holds Clarke in place in a warlike almost-hug.

They stand staring at Elan, Clarke’s blood pounding in her ears as she expects the worst, expects Elan’s mouth to open, expects him to scream, to beg to be killed.

But there’s nothing. He’s dead. His body is horrifying enough. It feels strange to be relieved that it’s only half a nightmare.

“We need to go back,” Octavia says. “We’ve got the samples, right? That has to be enough.”

“There’s more down here,” Clarke says. “We still haven’t figured out what happened to Bellamy.” She tears her eyes away from Elan’s fingers to look at Octavia. Her skin is pale, her eyes watery. She looks more like _Octavia_ than she has in years. Blodreina is nowhere to be found. “If you’re going back, you should take the samples, but I’m staying.”

Octavia stares her down, her eyes flashing, but not with the anger that has become so constant. There is only terror. Octavia is an animal trapped with her back against the wall. If she lashes out, it won’t be out of hatred. It will be out of a primal fear.

But Octavia doesn’t lash out. She looks down at her clenched fists. She visibly seems to remember why she’s here.

“Okay,” she says, swallowing back whatever else she had been about to say. “We keep going.”

 

* * *

 

 

_After Clarke stopped avoiding Bellamy, it didn’t mean that things stopped being uncomfortable._

_But that was more about who Clarke was now. She didn’t know how to talk to people anymore. She especially didn’t know how to talk to Bellamy. The events since he had come back to Earth had been impossible and confusing and terrifying, and even if they hadn’t been, she wasn’t sure how well she would have done, being around him again._

_It wasn’t just the love for him that swirled around their every interaction, and her guilt for loving him and still leaving him behind mixing unpleasantly with all the other times in their acquaintance when she had hurt him in a similar way. It was a confluence of everything that kept her away, because he had found himself in her absence. He had become something so good and strong without her, someone who could balance what he wanted with what everyone around him needed and could make the choice that would help the greatest number of people. He was what he needed to be, and he was what she had always wanted to be, and she could not stomach the fact that she no longer felt like she was equal to that._

_But she had promised to stop avoiding him, and so she met him every night at the fence and walked with him._

_It was just like it had been, back at the start. Walking the perimeter. Seeing Miller on guard and waving to him. Seeing Octavia. Murphy. Raven. Everyone else was dead and gone, but those walks always brought Clarke back to when they were alive._

_Bellamy would sometimes mention something that had happened back then, and Clarke would reply with her own memories, and sometimes they would talk, but more often they would just walk together, with Bellamy’s hands shoved into his pockets and Clarke’s arms folded across her chest to keep herself from reaching out._

_After Echo and Bellamy split up, she noticed that he walked with his hands by his sides, his fingers open._

_Guilty about one less thing._

 

* * *

 

 

They follow a path of blood that looks fairly fresh, and they find the handprint on the wall just before a shaft that leads down into the earth.

A mining ship, Clarke remembers. And this is the entrance to the mine.

The handprint is dark, dried blood.

Someone has written _DON’T_ above it in the same.

There’s an arrow pointing at the shaft.

“The ship opened up to allow the miners to dig straight from here,” Clarke says. Her voice is strained, and she swallows back nausea as she looks at the handprint. She thinks of Bellamy’s hand warm on her back and his fingers stretching from fists as he walked around the camp beside her. It’s his hand. She’s sure of it. He came up from the earth, and he took the time to warn anyone who might follow.

He bled the whole way, and her stomach clenches when she thinks of how far he had to travel on his own.

“There are ropes,” Echo says, stepping closer, grabbing one and beginning to pull it up. There’s a harness on the end of it. Empty, open. Someone left it willingly.

“There’s something down there,” Octavia says. She doesn’t sound frightened the way she did when they found Elan. She sounds like Clarke feels: resigned.

They need to know what happened.

They need to save Bellamy.

Echo pulls up two more harnesses, and then they lower themselves, letting out the ropes slowly, letting themselves down into the cavern below.

Their flashlight beams crisscross wildly as they try to take in everything at once.

Clarke’s rope is stained with blood, and she imagines Bellamy hauling himself up, his hands stained, smearing.

_You kept trying_ , she thinks, and her stomach aches for him.

He warned them not to go down here, but she doesn’t feel wrong about doing it. He warned them because he wanted to keep them safe. If he knew they were going to go looking for answers, he would have known they wouldn’t let the warning stop them. They wouldn’t let the danger stop them, either.  

For him, the three of them would do anything.

At the bottom of the shaft is a killing field.

Some of the bodies are like Elan’s: nightmarish visions of suffering. Mouths screaming open, filled with those strange fungal filaments. Some of the bodies are merely bloodied, laying where they fell, and Octavia zeroes in on those bodies immediately, tracing the bullet wounds and the sword slashes with a critical gaze.

“They turned on each other,” she says. She points as she speaks. “Wonkru. Second Sunrise. Wonkru. Bullets. Swords.” She looks back up at Echo and Clarke, and her eyes are edgy, nervous.

“Why would they do that?” Clarke asks.

Echo’s expression speaks volumes. It says things like _how sure are you that we can trust Wonkru anyway?_ While Octavia’s frown asks the same question about Second Sunrise.

“Bellamy made it out,” Echo says. “Whatever made them turn on each other, he didn’t trust any of them. He left.”

The three women stand in a triangular shape, facing each other, the bodies of the dead between them.

_They turned on each other,_ Clarke thinks. _They were afraid because some of them were getting infected like Elan, and they turned on each other in their fear._

“We should stop,” she says.

“Afraid of what we’ll do to each other?” Octavia asks. The speed of her reply tells Clarke that Octavia has been holding it in, waiting for the right moment to say it.

“No,” Clarke says, though that’s partly a lie. She thinks of Bellamy. She imagines his steadiness, his dark eyes, his freckles. She’s not afraid, because Bellamy is the link between the three of them, and he’s a strong link to have. “We have reason to trust each other.”

“We have all already turned on each other,” Echo says. “For our own reasons. None of them have been good enough to kill us before. Whatever it was that made these people kill each other, I think we can survive it. We each love Bellamy as much as he loves each of us. We cannot betray him like that.”

Octavia smiles, a quirk of a grin, and she inclines her head towards Echo.

“You’re right,” she says. It’s almost an apology. “Mutually assured destruction.”

Clarke stares at the dark tunnel ahead, chewing on her bottom lip.

“You two should stay here,” she says. Octavia rolls her eyes viciously. Echo looks like she’s trying very hard not to follow suit. “It’s not because I don’t trust you.”

She puts her pack on the ground and removes the samples, passing them over to Echo and Octavia both, distributing them evenly.

“You think this is enough to save him?” Echo asks. Clarke shrugs.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “But it’s better than nothing. Second Sunrise is equipped to deal with it. They’ve been surviving in this place for longer than we have. If they can figure out the…”

“Do you seriously think we’re going to let you go on your own?” Octavia finally interrupts. Her knuckles are white where she’s holding on to the samples. “He’s my brother. He’s _my_ responsibility. If anyone keeps going, it should be me.”

“Wonkru are your people. They need you.”

“They don’t need me anymore. They have Madi. And Madi needs _you_ ,” Octavia argues.

Echo does roll her eyes this time.

“This is absurd,” she says. “We need each other. This isn’t the time for a tallying of who has more people who need them. Have you learned _nothing_ from the past few months? We are all necessary.” Her voice is harsh, but her eyes are soft, and Clarke is surprised to see the force of that softness turned on _her_. “We all need each other. And he needs all of us. But Clarke should go.”

“Echo,” Octavia growls, but Echo just looks at her steadily.

“You have proven yourself to yourself,” she says. “You have begun to forgive yourself. Not that there aren’t still scars, but…” She waits, and Octavia nods, understanding. Their eyes turn on Clarke, now. Echo smiles sadly. “Clarke needs this more than you do.” Clarke feels a powerful need to shift away, to hide herself, to keep her face blank. She learned to hide her emotions long ago, and she got better at it when she and Madi were the only two people who mattered, but lately her façade has been cracking, and Bellamy’s illness has done away with most of her composure. She can feel the devastation growing on her face.

“Echo…” she starts, and the warrior steps closer, holding on to Clarke’s upper arms, keeping her in place. Keeping her from running.

“You _will_ survive this. And you will come back this way and get us. And when you do, you need to accept that you have done everything you could to help him. And then you will forgive yourself.”

Clarke isn’t sure she believes this, and she isn’t sure Echo’s demands will hold much sway over her once they’re free of this place, but she nods.

“Thank you,” she says.

Because the truth is that Echo has given her a gift.

She doesn’t have to worry about failing Bellamy and getting Octavia or Echo killed. She doesn’t have to worry about the samples being lost. If she does not return, the only person who will be hurt is herself, and there is a part of her that remains convinced that losing herself will be the only way to heal herself completely.

 

* * *

 

 

_“When he comes back,” Madi said to Clarke, when Bellamy had been gone for two days. “Will you tell him?”_

_“Tell him what?” Clarke asked. She was sitting on her bed, watching Madi’s awkward stance in the doorway. A child playing at being Commander. Every day, Clarke wondered if it was going to be the day Madi admitted that she no longer wanted The Flame, but she never even seemed weary of it. It was as if she was glad for something to do. Clarke loathed it, but she could appreciate the feeling. With Madi drawing away, and her mother well enough to control medical, and her friends still wary, she often felt as if she had nowhere to go. The only person who sought her out was Bellamy, and Clarke was the one avoiding becoming too close to him again._

_“That you love him,” Madi said simply._

_“It’s not that easy to tell someone you love them.”_

_“I love you,” Madi said, pointedly. Clarke snorted._

_“Very convincing.”_

_“I do, though. You know that. You just like to feel sorry for yourself.”_

_Clarke’s head snapped up, her brows furrowed._

_“Madi,” she said chidingly._

_“You do. Remember when you walked away after Mount Weather? You told me that if you could do it again, you would have realized that you weren’t the only one hurting. You told me that you wouldn’t have left. You said that it was a stupid decision, and that you were just feeling sorry for yourself.”_

_“But that was…”_

_“You’re doing the same thing now. Punishing yourself for something that wasn’t just your fault. Bellamy has accepted it. Why can’t you?”_

_“What is it that Bellamy’s supposed to have accepted,” Clarke said, very patient, feeling the annoyance welling up inside her. She missed Madi from Before. She missed the Madi who asked questions and took the answers at face value. She always knew that, Flame or no, Madi was going to grow up and stop accepting everything Clarke said as truth, just as Clarke did with her own mother, but she thought she had more time._

_She wondered, vaguely, if every parent thought there would be more time for their child to stay a child._

_“He accepts what he did. He accepts that he has to be sorry. And he accepts that punishing himself isn’t going to change what happened. He’s just going to keep trying to be better. That’s what he’s always done, remember? You told me that.”_

_“I told you a lot of things. You seem to be selectively choosing to use them against me.”_

_“You know that’s not what I’m doing.”_

_“Do I?”_

_“You’re feeling sorry for yourself again because you think I don’t love you anymore. Or you think I don’t need you. Just because you can’t control my whole life anymore, it doesn’t mean that I don’t.”_

_Clarke hated it when Madi spoke like that. Condescending, almost, except with enough of an undercurrent of sympathy that it came out pitying. It was the same way Lexa used to speak to her in her most infuriating moments, and it was difficult to hate when she had done it, too._

_“I think that I need to find a way to be myself again,” Clarke said carefully. “Because I haven’t been myself for a long time, and I’m not sure I remember how.”_

_Madi seemed satisfied with that, and she gave Clarke a small smile._

_“That’s good,” she said. “So when he comes back, you’ll tell him?”_

_Clarke rolled her eyes, a small smile fighting to appear on her face._

_It wasn’t enough to heal what was still broken between she and Madi, but at least Madi wanted to try._

_And it was nice, too, knowing that Madi approved. Madi was observant. Uncommonly observant. If she thought that Bellamy should be told, maybe he should._

_At the very least, he deserved to know that she would do anything for him. She had not had the chance to show him how she cared. She always seemed to be leaving, or choosing incorrectly, or hurting him even when she wanted nothing more than for him to be happy and safe. He deserved to know just how much she had always cared about him._

_She just had to figure out how to let him know._

 

* * *

 

 

She walks for a while before she finds the tablet.

There are dried bloody prints on it, and she has to scratch them off, and she wonders if they were from Bellamy or someone else. She hates thinking of him alone down here in this dark place, bleeding and lost.

The tablet is running out of charge, but there’s enough.

The video starts the moment she turns on the screen.

The man whose face appears first is the Second Son psychologist who came up with the expedition in the first place. She only ever saw him from across camp, and Bellamy had leaned in close, his shoulder brushing hers, and said, “that’s Rydek. He’s the one who wants to find the glowing. He thinks it’s some kind of religious symbol.” He had rolled his eyes and looked at her with fondness, and she had laughed along with him, enjoying how companionable it felt to be with him like that.

On the screen, Rydek looks less healthy than he had from across camp. He looks bleary-eyed and red-cheeked, almost like he’s drunk, but he keeps coughing, and Clarke has a feeling that he’s in the beginning stages of infection.

“We are almost lost,” he says, and he turns the camera around.

A number of the others are dead and dying around him. Clarke flashes her light around her, and she sees the bodies. None of the bodies here show signs of violence. This was all infection, all illness. On the screen, the dying cough, and they choke on their own blood, and Clarke watches them struggle with her heart in her throat.

“We have to go back,” says Bellamy’s voice, sudden and shocking from the tablet, and Clarke sucks in a sharp breath as the camera spins towards him.

Bellamy is leaning against the wall of the ship, still standing. Like Rydek, his eyes are red-rimmed and his face ruddy with illness, but he’s not as bad off as some of the others. His eyes are desperate, imploring the way they get sometimes, and Clarke wishes that she could reach through the screen and save him.

“We must keep going,” Rydek replies off-camera, and Bellamy shakes his head. She can see his exhaustion and his hurt, and his fingers scrabble at the metal wall behind him, trying to find the leverage and the energy to keep himself standing.

“There’s interference on the radio. I can’t get through, and we need to warn them. We have to go back and tell them…” Bellamy gags on something, on nothing, and spits a wad of blood on the ground. The camera tracks its progress lazily, like it’s academically interesting. “About the infection. We have to tell them to destroy this place.”

Rydek snarls, and then he moves quickly, dropping the tablet on the ground. It lands slightly tilted, so the world it captures is off-centered and sickening. He swings a knife in his hand and catches Bellamy in the side, wrenching a pained sound of disbelief that echoes in Clarke’s ears. But Bellamy fights back, and he pushes Rydek off him, and he manages to pin the older man on his stomach on the ground, his arm twisted around behind him.

“This is a place of _worship_ ,” Rydek sneers, his eyes gleaming with madness. Blood begins to leak from his eyes, from his nose, and Bellamy staggers back and nearly falls against the wall, his hand going to the knife in his side. He looks so fundamentally broken in that captured moment. So _hopeless_.

She remembers the hope he had felt in the first few weeks on the planet. So determined to live in peace. So determined to make Monty and Harper’s lives matter. He was the one who led the talks with Second Sunrise. He was the one who set up the camp, who pulled together a council to talk over all their decisions. He had been so sure that humanity could learn from its past mistakes.

But here he was, still suffering. Still alone.

“Run, Bellamy,” she murmurs, even though she knows he will. He takes a few gulping breaths, his hands already blood-slick from his wound. With a disgusted look in Rydek's direction, he heads out of frame, fleeing.

The video cuts to blackness, and Clarke almost puts it down and continues on, but then Rydek’s face comes into view. It’s hollowed out now, clearly captured sometime later. There’s a white, fibrous substance clustered under his nose, and a patch on his cheek that’s bleeding and strangely porous, like something is about to grow through it. It makes Clarke sick to look at his sallow skin, knowing that if they take Bellamy out of cryo, that’s what’s going to happen to him.

Rydek hardly even seems to notice.

“The lifeform is taking over,” he says. He sounds distant and unconcerned, as if it’s happening to someone else, someone he doesn’t particularly care for. “I have found the archives, and they told me what the others had suspected at the first. The ground was penetrated by my ancestors, by the first colonists, and they thought that they would explore the cave that they found beneath the surface. But there was something already living there. My people have always wondered what happened to the miners who stayed behind while the others left and made a home in this new world.” He sounds disappointed and a little hopeless. “Stories of great sacrifice, of great honor, or of a second home beneath the surface, they were all just stories. The infection killed them, and it has lain dormant ever since, waiting for someone to come back and continue its spread. The sky people, their ship, they are the ones who have woken it.” He coughs, and the matter that comes out isn’t quite blood. There’s something horrifyingly solid to it, but he spits it off camera, and Clarke is glad when he does not dwell on it long. “My people have peddled in stories and myths, and the truth is that it’s a computer program. The intermittent glowing. The sounds to the west. It has only ever been the ship trying to come back online, and now the people from the sky have woken it at last with their arrival. The AI in here is rudimentary at best, but she’s trying to promote the growth of the fungus. It has become her purpose to keep the crew members alive, even if they’re no longer alive in the same way they once were.” He laughs, disbelieving. “Elan was still alive when the fungus leeched him into the wall. I don’t think he still is. I can’t hear the screaming. Blake probably killed him on his way out.” He breathes, and Clarke can hear the wetness of it. Can imagine the fungus growing inside him. “I hope he makes it. I hope they bring back fire and bombs. The sky people want peace, but it cannot be possible with this thing still out here. I should have known. I should have stopped it. Instead, I turned my people against theirs, and I tried to gain the power of something that never existed.” He bows his head and shakes it, his eyes squeezed shut.

The video ends, and Clarke exhales shakily.

She returns to the home screen of the tablet, and she sees that Rydek has gathered information on the calibration and environmental controls from the ship’s computers. It’s the directive of the ship’s AI to keep the fungus alive, and Rydek has collected all the data the AI had to offer.

Instructions on how to kill it. Instructions on how to _cure_ it. It had been too late for Rydek, but maybe it won’t be too late for Bellamy. Clarke clutches the tablet to her chest.

She doesn’t know why she keeps going.

She never intends to go far, just to the end of the hallway to see what lies beyond in the darkened room. She tucks the tablet into her pack, securing the straps, moving quickly and silently, because she’s unable to shake the feeling that she’s being watched. All she wants is to get back to Octavia and Echo, still waiting for her with the dead.

When she takes a single step into the room at the end of the hallway, she hears the moan.

It’s a dreadful, echoing, guttural sound, and it sends lightning bolts of terror through her. It reminds her of that panther on the first few days on Earth. The sound had vibrated through her, paralyzing her. A predator readying itself to strike.

She stumbles backward, her heels nearly catching on the lip of metal beyond the door, but she stays on her feet.

The moan becomes a roar, and she readies her gun, the flashlight beam on top shaking.

From the darkness, a shape begins to form. Larger than she would have guessed Rydek to be, bulky with the fungal growth, and fast. He doesn’t have words, just a sound that quickly becomes a scream.

Clarke’s careful control is gone. Her apathy is gone. Her indecision about whether or not she even wants to survive is _gone_.

The creature that once was Rydek charges at her, and Clarke realizes that she wants to live.

She turns and flees, running through the narrow corridor, ducking under the mossy vines that hang from the ceiling, her boots squelching in the water that pools on the floor. The miners that built this place beneath the earth built it sturdy, built it to last, but she can hear Rydek crashing through the support beams, and she knows that there isn’t much time.

He’s gaining.

She turns and fires, remembering Bellamy showing her, remembering all the times she’s had to use that lesson since, and she feels a visceral pleasure when she hears him roar in pain.

_For Bellamy_ , she thinks, and she keeps running.

Rydek tackles her when she’s nearly at the end of a hall, and she sprawls, her head slamming into the wall so hard that black spots erupt in her vision. She only barely manages to spin as she falls, and she lands on her back and is able to roll to the side when she sees Rydek bearing down on her.

There’s no finesse to his attack, which isn’t surprising. He practically falls on her, and he may be actually trying to _bite_ her. She keeps her hands up and is able to keep his mouth from closing on any skin, but it’s a narrow margin, and she feels something give in her elbow with a sickening crack.

Her scream is more like a battle cry, and they struggle for dominance, rolling over one another. Something sharp scrapes along her ribcage, just above her stomach, and her cry gets higher pitched. She manages to get her knees up so she can push Rydek off her with her feet braced against his chest. He stumbles back, but his arms, bulky and disgusting, distended with something that moves under the surface of his discolored skin, still fumble for her, and he manages to fasten his fingers around her ankle and drag her backwards. Her ankle cracks beneath the pressure, broken.

She kicks at him with her other boot, and he punches down at her, vicious and feral.

She’s beginning to lose her grasp on consciousness when Octavia and Echo arrive.

Octavia is first, screaming a war cry and swinging her sword. She ducks under a meaty punch and cuts off Rydek’s arm, leaving his fingers grasping Clarke’s ankle but sending the man himself falling back down the hall. Echo isn’t far behind, and she lights an arrow on fire and releases it, sending it directly into Rydek face.

Clarke is in and out by now, but she knows that he burns.

She manages to tell Octavia to take a sample of the fungus from the arm. Echo pulls Clarke into her arms, and they watch as Octavia wraps the entire thing in a sheet of plastic. She straps it to her back like a sword.

She leaves her sword where it lies.

 

* * *

 

 

Surrounded by the bodies of Wonkru and Second Sunrise, staring up at the ropes and the elevator shaft, she tries to tell Echo and Octavia to leave her.

But Octavia is fierce in her denial, sneering that she can’t give up. Echo is more calm, more steady, but she doesn’t waver even when Clarke sobs her exhaustion, even when she misses the rope the first two times she tries to grab it, her vision blurring.

“You can’t give up on him,” Octavia says.

“We all need each other,” Echo says, and she straps Clarke into the harness.

“Madi needs you,” Octavia says.

“You need to do this for yourself,” Echo says.

“Bellamy did it alone,” Octavia reminds her.

Echo finishes, “and you are not alone.”


	3. I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones

Octavia has her arm around Clarke’s waist. She pulled Clarke’s arm over her shoulder, and now their fingers are interlaced over Octavia’s heart. She’s the only thing keeping Clarke on her feet. They don’t seem to want to work correctly, and it feels like she’s walking on sand. Echo puts her hand briefly on the top of Clarke’s head as she leaves them, moving back into the ship. Clarke can’t remember why, and she feels a flare of irrational panic.

_Don’t go in there. You’ll die. Please._

“We’re going to burn it,” Octavia says, as if she senses Clarke’s nervousness. She rests her head against Clarke’s as they walk, as they move toward the edge of the water, where the boat waits for them. “We’re going to destroy it, like he said to.”

“I want to watch,” Clarke says, and Octavia smiles. Her smile is no less feral, no less furious, but she isn’t vacant anymore. She feels more complete, more connected to reality, than she did before they went in.

“Good,” she says. “I want to watch too.”

It takes some time, but eventually Echo appears in the mouth of the ship, smiling. Breathing in the fresh air. Her eyes seek them out, standing all the way back at the edge of the water. She raises a hand in greeting.  

“The fuel lines have been emptied,” she shouts. She pulls her scarf up to cover her face, and then she turns back, holding her bow steady.

She releases the arrow, the tip lit, and she watches it catch fire on the spilled fuel that she spent the last twenty minutes splashing over everything.

The heat from the inferno that follows reaches Clarke, and it wakes her up a bit. Echo stands silhouetted by the flames, her posture strong and sure, her eyes on the ship. She has none of the despair that drove Clarke here. She has none of the anger that fuels Octavia even now. She saw the hurt caused to someone she loves, to a man she considers her family, and she found the source of the hurt, and she took it out.

Clarke understands now why Bellamy fell in love with her.

Clarke understands how it feels to be the focus of that kind of devotion, after all. There was a time when it nearly crushed her, knowing that Bellamy would do anything for her. To know that while she was on her downward spiral, he was following her, and he would keep following her until the bottom, because that was the kind of person he was.

It’s the kind of person Echo is, too. It’s the kind of person she has always been for her people, and now her people and Clarke’s people are the same. It would be harder _not_ to love her.

 

* * *

 

 

Octavia patches Clarke up as best as she can once they get to the boat, and Clarke slumps against her. The younger Blake hugs her to her side, pulling Clarke’s head so it rests back against her chest. Echo watches over them both, rowing, her movements steady and solid, like everything else about her.

“I’ll be infected,” Clarke warns them. One last attempt to get them to leave her behind, though she’s not sure anymore that that’s even what she _wants_.

She’s made it this far. For the first time in a long time, surviving seems worth it.

“You found the tools to cure it,” Echo says. Her smile is thin and barely a smile at all, but it’s there. She seems sad for Clarke, and it makes Clarke feel exposed. “We will get you home.”

It didn’t feel like home when they left. But now that they’re heading back, it feels closer to it than before.

And he’s there. Bellamy. They can fix him.

He’s _home_ more than any place she’s ever lived.

 

* * *

 

 

She’s not sure how long it takes them to get back to camp. She only remembers pieces of their journey.

She remembers stumbling between the two women, held up by them. She remembers Octavia fixing the splint on her ankle, and she remembers the pain that followed. She remembers falling to her knees and vomiting, someone’s hand rubbing her back. She remembers trying to sleep, remembers shivering with sickness, remembers staring up at the stars and realizing that none of the old constellations are there, and she remembers crying about it for some stupid reason.

Mostly she remembers Echo’s voice, Octavia’s voice. Encouragement, promises, outright lies that they were close. She remembers Echo pleading with her to get up. She remembers Octavia talking about Madi, and about Abby, about Bellamy.

“You’ve come so far,” Echo says at one point. “You can’t give up now.”

Clarke has disappointed so many people in her life. She can’t bear to disappoint another. And so she keeps going.

“We need you,” Octavia says once. “So you have to keep going.”

_We need you. We need you. We need you._

She lets it drive her. She lets it power every footstep. She lets them goad her back on her feet.

She’s still fighting when her body gives out. She claws at consciousness. She chokes and gags on nothing, trying to breathe, and she sees Echo and Octavia above her, both of them panicked, and she wants to tell them that she’s _trying_ , that they’re right, that she’s not giving up.

_I need to do this_ , she begs herself. _Please let me do this. I need to make it home._

Echo looks bereft, but Octavia’s expression has taken on a harder edge.

It’s second nature to believe that Octavia is angry with her, that she hates her, but the young warrior leans forward and presses her forehead against Clarke’s, kneeling over her.

“We love you, Clarke,” she says. Clarke’s heart gives a miserable, hopeful jolt, even as she fades. “Rest now. We can take you the rest of the way.”

 

* * *

 

 

When she wakes up, Echo is leaning on her elbows on the edge of a pristine white mattress, sitting in a chair beside the bed.

“You’re okay,” she says, and she gives another one of those sad smiles. “We’re back at camp. The infection had reached your lungs, but thanks to the information you found, the doctor was able to engineer a way to kill it. We are still in quarantine for a bit longer, but it worked.”

“Bellamy?” Clarke asks, and Echo shakes her head.

“Not yet. He’s still in cryo. They’re preparing to treat him soon.”

Clarke nods and sits up. Echo helps her scoot backwards so she can prop herself up against the pillows, and she sees Madi beyond the glass of the quarantine ward, her face poking up in the window, like she’s standing on her toes to see. Madi’s smile is bright and childlike, and she waves with enthusiasm when she catches Clarke’s eye.

“Octavia is in a room down the hall,” Echo says. She smiles over her shoulder at Madi when she follows Clarke’s eyeline. “She was here with me to keep vigil, but she went to take a nap. You gave us quite a scare on the way back. You stopped breathing. I think caring about you has worn her out.”

It’s meant to be a gentle joke about Octavia, but Clarke snorts a little bit with understanding.

“I think caring about me does that to people,” she says. She looks again at Madi’s anxious expression and smiles a little to show her she’s okay, but her words burn inside her.

“Madi told me to tell you that she’s proud of you,” Echo says. “She said that she was mad at you for leaving, and mad at you for being reckless, but that she knows why you did it, and she’s glad. She said that she’s proud of you for helping Bellamy. That it’s exactly what she had always expected of you. And she wanted me to specify that it was _Madi_ saying this, not any of the past commanders.”

“She has a habit of knowing exactly what to say,” Clarke says. She rests her hand over her heart and locks eyes with Madi, who smiles again and returns the gesture before blowing Clarke a kiss and leaving, off to do whatever it is that a twelve-year-old does when they command an army that has no war to fight.

“She also told me that _this_ is the person you used to be,” Echo says. She grins a little. “I think she believes I still resent you for what happened on Earth. She was insistent that I pass on the message. I think it’s at least partly because she thought I would benefit from hearing it.”

“Do you?” Clarke asks. “Resent me? I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

Echo frowns. She’s still holding onto Clarke’s elbow from when she helped her sit, and her fingers dance over Clarke’s skin unthinkingly, an almost nervous tic from a woman who has never seemed nervous before.

“No. Not anymore. I still hate that it happened. And I don’t regret hating you for it at the time. And if you ever did it again, if you ever hurt him again like that, I would do what I had to do to keep him safe. But I don’t hate you, Clarke. I’m glad you’re still alive. I’m glad you didn’t die down there, even though I think there’s probably a part of you that wanted to.”

“I’m not sure when I stopped actively wanting to survive,” Clarke admits. It feels absurd to talk about, because she’s usually so withdrawn about everything, and now she’s just _saying_ it. To Echo, of all people. “But I was fighting back against Rydek, and I realized that I wanted to live.”

“And yet you tried to get us to leave you behind anyway,” Echo points out.

“I think I was trying to be noble,” Clarke says, and Echo laughs. She squeezes Clarke’s hand, held loosely in her own, and Clarke returns the pressure. “Thank you for coming with me. I never would have been able to get back on my own.”

“I know. That’s why I went with you.” They smile at each other, though Echo’s is still tense. “When we left together, I wanted to keep you safe because of what you mean to Bellamy. Because despite everything that’s happened…all of my family are safe and happy now except for him. I know you and I didn’t know each other well at first, but I learned about you in the years we were gone from Earth. Bellamy told me about you, and about how we were similar, and how we both have a need to protect our people. Bellamy is the only one of my people still suffering, and so when you tried to leave, I knew that I needed to go with you. To keep you safe for him. But as we traveled, I started to want to keep you safe for _you_ , too.” She sounds slightly thrown by this revelation, and she smiles again, a bit helpless. “You are my people now too, Clarke. I know you have been feeling as if you are alone, and I don’t want you to feel like that. I don’t want you to feel like Bellamy and Madi are all that you have. I’m here too.”

Clarke removes her hand from Echo’s so that she can throw her arms around her, hugging her.

“Madi isn’t the only person who knows exactly what to say,” she says in explanation, her cheeks coloring as Echo’s arms come up around her, a little slower, a little surprised. “ _Thank you_.”

 

* * *

 

 

When Bellamy is taken out of cryo, all three of them stand together at the back of the room, watching over him, silent guardians.

When he is being treated, they stay, feeling cagey and nervous as they watch the doctors work.

When he opens his eyes, hours later, Octavia is the one watching, sitting by his bedside while Clarke and Echo pace at the foot of his bed, and Octavia calls them over. His gaze takes them all in, panic rising as he seems to realize that the three people he loves best are all here, exposed, unsafe because of him.

“You’re okay,” Octavia says, and her hand grabs his. She leans in to kiss him on the forehead. “You’re not sick anymore, big brother.”

“The three of us went on a little adventure for you,” Echo says, her words drawling and amused but undeniably _glad_. Still shaken, still tense, but so relieved. Clarke can relate.

“What did you do?” Bellamy asks. His voice is hoarse, and Clarke hates to remember him on that video, sick and shaking and desperate.

_He’s okay_ , she has to remind herself. _He’s okay, because we saved him_.

“We did what we had to do. To save our people,” she says, and his eyes meet hers across the room. “Our person,” she amends, and her voice breaks. Her vision is blurred, but she can see the way his eyes are rimmed with red, and she knows she isn’t the only one on the verge of tears.

Octavia caves first, resting her forehead against Bellamy’s chest as she cuddles close the way she must have when she was as child. Echo sits against the headboard beside Bellamy’s pillows on the other side of the bed, draping her arm across Bellamy’s shoulders so his head can rest against hers. Clarke approaches last, slowly, uncertain still. Echo doesn’t even look at her, just reaches out and tangles their fingers together. She tugs Clarke in close, pulling until Clarke sits on the bed by Bellamy’s hip, facing Echo and Bellamy both, her knees knocking against Echo’s. She reaches for Bellamy’s hand with the hand that isn’t still clutching Echo’s, and Bellamy takes it. His head swivels between the three of them, still giddy with disbelief.

Clarke still remembers the Bellamy from before, the Bellamy who didn’t believe that he was enough. The Bellamy who hated himself, who blamed himself, who let people walk all over him and expected nothing in return. She remembers after Bellamy killed Dax, the warm pressure of him by her side as he called himself a monster. The utter confusion in his eyes when she offered him forgiveness, as if he could not conceive of a world where someone thought he was worth the effort.

She regrets a lot about the last six years, and she regrets most that she wasn’t there to watch him become the Bellamy before her now: the man whose first instinct isn’t to pull away from the love being shown him. Instead, he pulls them closer. He allows their love to wash over him.

It makes Clarke think that maybe she can do the same.

 

* * *

 

 

Later, he comes to find her. Echo and Octavia were released first from quarantine, because they never showed signs of infection, and because their blood tests have been clear for the past two days. Clarke and Bellamy are condensed to the front two rooms of the quarantine ward, supposedly for another two days, though Clarke knows that Abby is arguing for a third.

It’s the first time since she’s been back that it’s just been the two of them. They haven’t been able to say much, never having a moment alone, but he’s been _looking_ at her. She knew this was coming.

“Can we talk?” he asks in the doorway, and she nods, setting down her sketchbook on the bed between them as he sits on the end of it. She knows from past conversations that he likes to flip through it to give his hands something to do as they talk, but he doesn’t this time. His expression is still unreadable, the way it has been lately, and it makes her nervous until he says, “Echo told me you were going to go out there alone.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that at first, so she shrugs.

“I would have, if she and Octavia didn’t stop me,” she admits.

“You were going to go out there even knowing you might not make it back.”

There’s a defensiveness in his tone that edges towards anger. Mostly, it’s pleading. He wants her to give him some explanation that doesn’t boil down to him alone. Something noble about the good of the group. Something _more_.

“I owed you,” she says, and his expression clouds over.

“You don’t owe me anything.”

She frowns deeply at that, and she shakes her head, scooting closer, crossing her legs in front of her. He turns his body too, one leg tucked in front of him, his knee just barely touching hers. His other foot is still planted on the floor, as if he’s prepared to flee if he has to.

“I owe you everything,” she says. It’s not entirely, not _literally_ true, but it’s true enough. If she was the kind of person who could talk about her emotions, she would probably be able to break down all the ways that the words hold meaning to her.

She would list every good thing he has ever done for her. She would describe the way she feels safe with him, the way she has always felt _complete_ when they’re together. She would tell him how important he is to her, because he _is_ important to her, and because she can’t stand the fact that he doesn’t know it.

“I would never want you to risk your life for mine,” he says, his voice still pitched low and desperate, like it’s something he _needs_ her to understand.

Clarke mimics the tone when she speaks, when she asks, “can’t you see how _loved_ you are?”

She has thought for so long that Bellamy wears life’s wounds more openly than most. Life has been cruel to him. It has been cruel to anyone who has managed to survive this long, but to Bellamy it often seemed like life had gone to special efforts to curse him, because he didn’t even have the benefit of feeling like he deserved any better.

He has always deserved better, and Clarke has spent so long thinking that he does that she’s surprised to realize that she’s never spoken the thought aloud.

“You are _so_ loved,” she repeats, because Bellamy still hasn’t managed to speak. He’s looking at her like she has answers he needs. It’s the same way he looked at her when he invited her to join the council on the bridge when they were orbiting Earth. It’s the same way he looked at her when Jordan first woke them up. It burned under her skin before, that he could still look at her like that after she left him to die, but she feels different now. It’s just like Echo said. She has been changed by their shared journey. She isn’t sure yet if it’s the kind of lasting self-forgiveness Echo claimed would follow, but it’s at least a start. “I wasn’t the only one who was willing to risk everything,” she reminds him. “Echo and Octavia would have gone without me. We all decided we would take whatever risks we had to. For _you._ ”

Bellamy sighs, and he looks away, and she can see the way it wars on his face, _wanting_ that love and being grateful for that love and yet wanting to tell her that he isn’t worth the risk.

“I already talked to both of them,” he finally says. “And I’m not happy about any of it. I mean, _thank you_ , but never do that again.”

His smile in her direction is a little helpless, a little hopeful, like he’s not sure she’ll understand, and she smiles weakly in response. The space between them on the bed feels too big to conquer, and she looks at his profile as he stares back down at his hands in his lap. They’re fidgeting again, curling and uncurling, like he doesn’t know what to do with them.

“Did you come to me last because you knew I’d argue?” she asks, and when he looks at her again, she smiles.

She’s not sure if he recognizes this gentle teasing as she intends it: she’s trying to give him an out. To move the conversation back into a direction they can both be comfortable with.

“No,” he says thoughtfully. “I came to you last because I knew we had to have a more complicated conversation, and I wasn’t sure where to start.”

He doesn’t look away this time, and she forces herself to keep eye contact.

“I don’t know how complicated it has to be,” she says, and she tracks his eyes when she bites her lip: his eyes follow the movement. Even though her heart feels like it’s seconds from stopping, even though she has learned to hide her feelings from everyone, even though she’s terrified of continuing, she knows that this is the right moment. This is the thing she has been avoiding during those long walks together. Maybe she’s been avoiding it for longer. For _years._ This is the piece that has been missing in this new world. She sucks in a sharp breath and continues, “not on my end, anyway. There’s nothing complicated about it. I love you.”

_Love_ is a word that can and does mean many things to her. It is a word she has been willing to apply to Bellamy for years, even if only to herself, and even if she hasn’t always meant it in the same way in which she means it now. _Love_ can be a multi-faceted word, and with Bellamy, that’s exactly what it is. It encompasses so many feelings. It doesn’t feel like _enough_ of a word for what she feels for him. There are so many _ways_ to love someone, and Clarke is pretty sure that with Bellamy she feels all of them.

But she knows exactly what she’s saying when she uses _love_ now, and she knows from the flickering emotions in Bellamy’s eyes that he hears it.

He does not bother to search for words of his own. Not at first.

He reaches across the bed and takes her hand, where it’s propped in her lap. He wraps his big fingers around her smaller ones. He reads her expression, his eyes skating over her features as if trying to catalogue everything. As if making sure that this is what she wants.

And then he kisses her.

The press of his lips to hers reignites a fire in her heart that she hadn’t even realized had grown cold. The taste of him, the sound of his breathing and the quiet, contented sound he makes in the back of his throat, it reminds her of how it felt to fall in love with the ease of a child. Uncomplicated. Certain. She allowed herself to love so easily, back then. It was only ever with Bellamy that she hesitated, and it feels prophetic, now. Like she knew that this was too much love for a child to feel. Like she knew that she had to grow up before she could handle it.

It isn’t a long kiss, because he pulls back and rests his forehead against hers. They look at each other, and his eyes are shadowed and dark and vulnerable, and she imagines that her own eyes probably reflect the same. She smiles, and his answering smile is relieved.

“Maybe it’s not very complicated,” he concedes.

“Not anymore,” she says.

“Thank you.”

“I had to.”

“I mean it. _Thank you_.”

“I _had_ to,” she repeats, and this time she allows her voice to break. “I needed to save you. We all did.”

“Because you love me,” he says, and though there’s hesitation in his voice, a reluctance to believe that he has earned such devotion, he doesn’t deny it.

She isn’t the only one who has been growing.

“Because I love you,” she agrees, and she leans in closer, and this time she kisses him lazily, gently, only a little more than a peck, like she just wants to remind him that she’s here.

Like she wants to remind him that she will _continue_ to be here.

“And I love you,” he says, like he can scarcely believe they’re having this conversation.

He’s crying, she realizes. Quietly, the way he does. Eyes rimmed in red, tears slipping silently from his eyes. She leans in closer to kiss the tears from his cheek, and his hands slide to her elbows, holding her steady, keeping her close.

Slowly, she wraps her arms around his neck, and he hugs her back. She remembers when he pulled the lever and opened the dropship door the first time they landed on Earth. She remembers the way the light flooded in, banishing the darkness, and the way her first lungful of fresh air tasted in her mouth. She remembers the feathery, joyful sensation, the first good thing she had felt since her father was floated.

_Hope_.

She feels it again, now.

But this time, the moment drags, and it lasts, and hope stays.


End file.
